After Heikki’s post, I have to write out my take too – here goes:

We’ve been offered a chance to run a small dive operation in the north of Bali. The dive centre is owned by the Company, and accompanied by a hotel resort. The customer volumes have been low throughout the year for the last two years or so, and the Company would like to see the business grow. That’s what they’re hoping to achieve by sending us up there.

There are positives and negatives to the offer, as always. Negatives first: It’s up there, far away from everything. It takes three hours in a car up the winding roads over the mountain range and through the jungle to get there, and the facilities are not that up-to-date. Only one of us would have the actual work visa with real pay to boot, the other one would have to get by with commissions and sales, which means quite a meager wage for one of us, and not a massive amount for the other one either. (I do have to say though that we’ve been living off one budget for quite a while now, so that wouldn’t be anything new.) The local religion (Balinese hinduism) has a habit of sounding off very lound prayer calls in the morning as well as in the evening, which has proven irritating in the past. And we’d have to do supplying trips down south (read: Sanur/Denpasar area) pretty much weekly to keep the shop and the resort stocked.

On the positive side, it would be an unparalleled chance to show what we can do. We would get to design the dive shop interior, run the daily operations, deal with customers and answer their emails. We’d also have to manage a little staff, learn the nooks and crannies of accounting a small business and do all the marketing both online and offline. There is an opportunity to be one’s own boss without actually bearing the financial burden of becoming an entrepeneur. We’d have the freedom of making the best of the business as we can, creating our own best practices and ways of working. Also we’d improve on the web pages, try to get them higher in the search results and also do some translating.

Moreover, it’s not every day that fresh diving instructors get the opportunity to run a business to the best of their abilities with this amount of history in the field. It will look very good in both our diving and non-diving CVs, not to mention the mass of experience we’d gain from the trip. Plus, we’d be diving easily the best sites in Bali pretty much daily. Just because of the remoteness, not too many divers actually make it all the way up there which makes the sites absolutely pristine and teeming with marine life.

Adding to that, we’d finally have a real apartment, with a real kitchen and bedrooms and air conditioning and stuff, all paid for by the company. That is to say, yours truly has been suffering from home sickness in the sense of longing for a home anywhere for a while now, and having a place to call home is extremely fetching for me indeed. Even if it wouldn’t be for much more than a year or so, it would still beat moving every four months. And, did I mention the steady pay for one of us already? That’s something freelancing instructors down in southern parts of the island don’t get. That would mean we wouldn’t have to dip into our savings any longer, even if we wouldn’t be generating much income either. And we’d still get the commissions and provisions on diving days and equipment sold, as well as courses taught.

Many of the actual details of the agreement are still open, but we’ll do our best in negotiating them. We haven’t been discussing the actual whens of the deal either, but we do know that we could do our trip back to Finland in September and continue the work in October.

But, as always, it’s not as cut-and-dry as one would hope. As Heikki wrote, there’s the option of Finnish summer, our loved ones and probably the best food in the world. With the unemployment benefits and summer cottages to take care of, we’d be happy as pigs in mud there. Need a good, hard think on this.

Tags: accommodation, diving, money, moving, oh bugger, planning, religion, work

Yeah, I’m still here too. I’ve had some ear troubles, so it’s been dry days for a while. Finally the ears started to feel better, and I got a call asking if I’d be willing to do two nights in Tulamben (diving during the day of course). I said sure, so here I am, waiting for the guest to turn up. Chances are there’s going to be at least the wreck and the Drop-off, needless to say I’ll want to know what the guest wants to do.

Otherwise it’s been quite quiet and relaxing, I’m still on the internship (i.e. not getting paid but getting to dive a lot) whereas Heikki signed off from the internship (guiding & teaching for money, but when there are no guests, he’s not diving either).  As Heikki already wrote, we’re looking for a place to move into, as our rent for the Bedroom is only paid  until May 17 or 18. The little room has served us well, but I’m most definitely looking forward to not having to use earplugs six nights a week thanks to the less-than-brilliant band playing across the street. Some of the places we’ve seen have been absolutely beautiful, some less so, but all the same they’ve been pretty much in the top end of our price range. Looks like we need to do some more searching, which requires a lot more footwork than back home.

Most of the rentals are not in newspapers or online, but simply advertise their availability on the street they’re located. The closer you get to the beach, the steeper the prices (obviously). Luckily we have the scooter, which gives us a pretty nice range too. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Tags: accommodation, diving, oh bugger, practical stuff, prices, Tulamben

It’s been fun, I have to admit. Also, it’s been hard and occasionally not fun, as I managed to drop a weight pocket today (writing this offline on Wednesday) to a slope on Sakenan dive site, depth of about 30 metres and struggled afterwards a bit… So yeah, becoming an instructor does not make you infallible in diving. We did get some pretty good dives in with moray eels and a frogfish, got the new wetsuit down to about 40 metres and crushed. I still need lots of kilos to get me under with it, but slowly it’s getting easier and easier.

[a very diving-specific explanation follows, skip if not interested:] For the uninitiated, a new wetsuit is very buoyant indeed, and going diving with a brand new one means you need to take a lot more weight than with an older, dived-in wetsuit. This essentially means that I was wearing both a weight belt and my weight pockets (integrated into the BCD), one of which gave and dropped off. In the blue. Which sucked big time. The buoyancy is a result of having gas bubbles within the neoprene (incidentally, this is the feature that keeps you warm, not the water that gets in your suit), and as gas bubbles have the tendency to be lighter than the surrounding water, buoyancy increases as the thickness of the wetsuit increases and vice versa. That’s also one of the reasons behind our doing a lot of deep dives lately – both me and Heikki have been compressing our respective suits.

Also, a cool feature of my suit is that as it’s deep red in primary colour, it turns dark purple when I go deeper than about 15 metres. This is because water absorbs certain wavelengths of light, and one of the first colours to go is red. So in effect, my suit changes colour! How neat is that?
[end of diving-specific explanation, you can breathe now]

In other news, we’ve been doing instructor specialties for the last two days and have a day or two more to go with that. We will end up with ten specialties each, which in turn means that we have a wider range of courses we can teach. We have now the Wreck, Deep, Drift, Night, Nitrox, Oxygen provider and certain fish identification, coral conservation and the like specialties. We’ll see what the eventual list looks like, but not a bad start at all.

While we were doing the wreck specialties, we bumped into a napoleon wrasse. It is a big fish indeed.

In the photo is our fellow German instructor, Mel (left). On the right, the aforementioned napoleon wrasse with a jack. Gives you some sense of scale, Mel’s a little taller than yours truly.

Also on the same dive we found an octopus barely hiding:

It was nervously flickering colours, which looked very wicked.

All in all, the Liberty wreck is a fabulous dive site, and the dives yesterday were just the thing that was needed to remind me why we do this. On a good day, the diving is spectacular, people are nice and things just roll. On a bad day, it’s just the opposite. We live in the hope that the majority of the days will be good ones.

Here’s a portrait of our colleague Mandy (U.K.) on a good day:

Look at those moves!

And I’ll leave it that. Will upload more later when we have a better internet day.

Tags: diving, instructor internship, it's good to be me, natural beauty, oh bugger, PADI IDC, photos, practical stuff, stress

I can’t believe it’s been two weeks already. Days go by so fast it’s not real. Usually it’s get up, get to the centre, go dive, go eat, sleep, repeat. We haven’t had too much time to explore the island, but Sanur is pretty easy town. You can find pretty much anything you’d want, and life is very easy when it’s simple. Relaxing not to have to want all sorts of stuff for a while.

So what’s up? There’s the sun tanning us up, and the rain cooling us down every once in a while. The art shop outside our homestay (a.k.a. Enny’s) has live music every night except Sunday, so we fall asleep to covers of Sting, Bob Marley and lots of others. There’s a coconut palm growing behind our bathroom window, which only has a grille, so we can look at trees while washing. There are too many gekkos to count, but only one of them is pink. (really cute and quick too, so no pictures, sorry).

Our daily commute is 5 minutes on a scooter and then depending on where we dive either 10-60 mins on a boat or 3 hours on in a wheezing minivan (to Tulamben). We get to dive almost every day, and when we don’t dive there’s the centre’s swimming pool to satisfy the need to get wet. All in all, life’s pretty sweet.

Today (that would be Saturday as I’m writing this) on the second dive of the day we saw two turtles swimming off on the reef. Apparently they’re pretty rare hereabouts, judging from the enthusiastic comments later back on board. We rode some pretty strong currents today, and I can feel the effort it took in my muscles.

Also we’ve been taking good care of the random Finns who come to Blue Season to dive. Of course we’re talking with the other customers too, but somehow it’s nice to talk in your mother tongue with people. And I suppose it can’t really hurt the business either…

Long days mean short nights and I have to take what sleep I can. Diving again tomorrow.

edit on Sunday:

We just came back from the boat, this time we’ve been thoroughly bumped on the way back. Saw some manta rays (pictures to follow, keep checking the gallery) and some turtles and I managed to drop my brand new mask into the current. My language was very foul for a while. Will try and replace it as soon as possible. Otherwise things are just peachy. I’ll also try and get some rest, this stuff takes its toll too.

Tags: it's good to be me, natural beauty, oh bugger, time, transportation

I have been very quiet for some time (again), because I really feel like I’ve taken one too many hits from the stress on this whole assignment. Although my anxiety as such does not feel so overwhelming anymore, the somatic symptoms prevail. Muscle ache, sleepiness (10 hours a night isn’t enough), sweating of palms and feet, being out of breath and gastrointestinal disorders could result from a number of things, but my best guess is a sort of anxiety disorder. I hope to know more on coming Friday after consulting a doctor.

In actual news, there has been some progress in the repatriation negotiations. I would love to give out more details, but there are so many company confidential ones I don’t want to take my chances. I hope it suffices to say that Corporation payroll will be missing one specialist by the end of this year.

I’d be jumping up and down from pure excitement if I was feeling well.

Tags: oh bugger, planning, sleep, stress, time, travel, why I wanted a change, work

Oh, bloody hell. And oh yeah!

For one, the Corporation payroll withheld 70% of my salary in taxes this month. Those masala-eating surrendermonkeys have been paying too little taxes so far, so they decided to compensate a bit now that I am leaving soon. Of course, it must be bloody difficult to get the percentage right when there are so many choices (four), and the highest one is chosen when annual income exceeds 7500 euros.

And of course I have a hugely expensive honeymoon trip to pay on top of usual living expenses this month.

On the other hand, we’re off for the said honeymoon in 12 hours. I can’t wait!

Tags: colleagues from India, holiday, it's good to be me, money, oh bugger, surprises, travel, ways of working, what is different, why I wanted a change, work

There is an expat saying, or more like a rhetorical question, that goes around. It’s used whenever anything goes wrong or works in an unexpected manner. It’s this: “Did India surprise you?” This country does surprise us, daily. Most of the time it’s nothing big, occasionally it’s even something that’s positive, working or just simply induces happiness.

As we were heading out for dinner however, the surprise was a bit on the nasty side. It’s payday today, and my sweetie gets an SMS every time the balance on his account changes. We were expecting the usual monthly sum (as is due until the end of November, the end of the contract), but somehow about 70% of the sum had been deducted. In other words, only 30% of the monthly salary landed on the account. We do not know why, but the guess is that the tax people at the Corporation have decided to do Something Radical, and they decided not to give a heads-up.

I’d say this is inconvenient, as we’re leaving tomorrow morning for Maldives and can’t reach the people at the office to find out what is going on and why. Happy honeymoon from the Corporation, or something. Sigh. Patience is wearing thin, since pretty much everything we have to sort out we also need to bitch, moan and yell at someone with the Corporation to get the sorting done.

Here’s hoping we can unscrew this screw-up. At the latest it will be sorted when we come back in a week. Expect photos, lots of photos.

Gone divin’.

Tags: oh bugger, practical stuff, surprises, what?

It’s been quite a while since I’ve last written anything, so here’s a summary:

I travelled back to Finland in early September, found out that the glasses weren’t according to the prescription I got, and once again I had to extend the sick leave. While there was supposed to be a prism of 2 prd in front of the right eye and a zero lens in front of the left, the opticians in India had put 2 prd prisms on both. Needless to say, my symptoms didn’t go away with those.

At this point I might have felt a a tiny bit frustrated.

Fast forward two weeks and we’re back in Bangalore. I left the glasses to the optician shop for fixing and started the wait once more. Of course, there were again some delays, but I finally received the glasses I needed last Friday. I hoped to have at least a couple of days to try them out and adjust to using them, but the TL didn’t exactly agree. On top of demanding immediate 100 per cent work effort, he told me all my annual leave would be nullified because of the sick leave.

You see, the local policy is six days of sick leave a year, after which the employee has to use his or her annual leave days as sick leave. When annual leaves have been consumed, additional days are deducted directly from the employee’s salary. (And there’s no social security. Someone still willing to call India “civilised”?)

In my case, however, the civilised world has had its say: our global policy for expatriates grants me three months of paid sick leave, so my annual leaves should still be there. Being in India is already quite a challenge, and being here for seven months without leave would be too much to bear.

I presented the policy to the TL, who saw it best to dispute both the policy and applicable legislation, demanding a reduction to my annual leaves. This was the last straw to me.

I have stood up against his passive-aggressive bullshit for five months now, and in my opinion that’s five months more than the maximum tolerable abuse time from your manager. As I’ve written before, I have tried to talk about it with the TL and with local HR, but his attitude is still exactly the same as before. Of course I understand that he’s pissed about a bloody expensive employee being on long sick leave, but that just doesn’t justify his accusations and hostility towards me. What the hell am I supposed to do about being incapacitated to work?

I can’t do miracle cures yet, but at least I have a huge Corporation full of Big Bosses to help me do something. During last weekend I and Eve spent several hours composing a summary about what has happened since I came to India last May, along with a cover letter addressed to half a dozen managers, second level managers, department heads and so on. On Monday morning I checked my intended recipient list with one of the expat bosses in our office and sent the whole thing out.

Two and half days later there is quite a lot of debris flying around. I have had talks with local HR, European HR managers, my old line manager and a couple of other chaps. The consensus seems to be that I have a case and something needs to be done, but [your preferred higher entity here] only knows what and isn’t going to tell yet. I may get a new manager, I may carry on with the current one, or I may even get sent back home early. I expect it to take at least a week or two before there’s anything to report.

So how’s your life?

Tags: colleagues from India, oh bugger, travel, ways of working, what is different, what?, why I wanted a change, work

There is something mystical about jigsaw puzzles. There they sit, harmlessly in their boxes, waiting to be assembled by someone with a little time to spare. Some day you start doing it, just to realise later that it has saved your marriage. And some other day you just put together some pieces in order to kill time.

My session today with a 3000-piece Ravensburger was of the former kind.

Just a couple of hours ago I tried to clarify my problematic situation at work, but at that time I wasn’t able to pinpoint either the exact problem nor the solution. I spent a couple of hours thinking about it – in front of the jigsaw puzzle of course – and I think I found them both.

The problem itself can be divided in two parts, the personal and the professional. They are quite closely intertwined, but still somewhat separable. The solution is the kind of one I usually prefer anyway, I just had to take some time to get it organised in my head. In any case, I feel like I’ve really accomplished something here.

The personal part of the problem is a piece of cake: I am not compatible with the Team Leader’s passive-aggressive bullshit. To be exact, I’m not compatible with any kind of bullshit, so this part was easy to identify.

The professional part took me some time, but here it is: the TL’s motives for assigning tasks are not what they should be.

We agreed about five weeks ago that I should do a spec that was assigned to our team, not knowing that my sick leave would get extended this far. I also missed most of the trainings regarding the task because I had to run around the city arranging my housing, banking and such matters in the start of the assignment. At this point I can safely say that there’s no chance whatsoever for me to complete the spec in time, especially since there’s a wedding party to be arranged among other things.

The TL’s decision to push me to do it anyway is a prime example of his lack of professionality. The spec would take until the end of year to complete, and by then I would have wasted two thirds of my assignment on everything else but building up a functioning team in Bangalore. If the TL himself thinks I won’t have time for a honeymoon trip due to this spec, how in hell could I have time to teach people what to do here?

By looking at the situation rationally, there is no possible reason to assign this spec to me. After all, it could be more efficiently done by local workers, with about 20% of the cost and with way better end results than what I can pull out of my hat in this timeframe. On top of that, I would be available to help others and could use my valuable time with the tasks I was hired to do.

I’m not going to analyse what the TL’s motives for this idiotic decision are, but I’m surely going to take action to prevent him from damaging the whole team this way. As much as I would love to take this to a higher level, I think I first have to tell him what he is doing wrong.

Not that I am complaining for having to call his bullshit.

Tags: colleagues from India, oh bugger, ways of working, what?, work